Exploring the cultural dimensions of environmental victimization

It has become increasingly clear in recent years that our understanding of ‘victimisation’ is informed by a whole range of societal and political factors which extend well beyond whatever particular form of words appears in any given directive, code or legislative instrument concerning crime, crime victims or criminal justice systems. In this paper, I will seek for the first time to apply recent developments in our understanding of so-called 'cultural victimology' to the issue of environmental harm and its impact on human and non-human animals. McCGarry and Waklate (2015) characterise cultural victimology as broadly comprising of two key aspects. These are the wider sharing and reflection of individual and collective victimisation experiences on the one hand and, on the other, the mapping of those experiences through the criminal justice process. In this discussion I will examine how environmental victimisation is viewed by and presented to society at large and will argue that such representations often fail, as a form of testimony, to adequately convey the traumas involved. Nor is this achieved through the application of present models of criminal, civil or administrative justice regimes in many jurisdictions. This lack of cultural acknowledgement of the harms vested on environmental victims, it is argued, afford us a clearer understand of the continued reticence amongst lawmakers, politicians and legal practitioners to adequately address the impacts of such victimisation through effective justice or regulatory mechanisms. This is unfortunate given that the often collective nature of environmental victimisation makes this particularly suited to a more cultural analysis and understanding. It is argued that various forms of environmental mediation processes might hold the key to this cultural reticence to accept environmental harm as a 'real' and pressing problem as compared to other criminal and civil justice concerns

'In your own words ... ': Questions and answers in a Supreme Court trial

This paper reports on a study of barrister questioning strategies in the course of a six-day Supreme Court murder trial involving sixty different barrister-witness dialogues. In this paper questioning procedures in conjunction with witness answer forms are considered, to gain some measure of the extent to which witnesses are allowed to 'tell their own stories in their own words'. Additional factors taken into account include the presumed sympathies of respective witnesses in order to measure the possibility that questioning strategies differ according to an assumed witness sympathy for the defense or prosecution. The resulting statistics reveal that witnesses provide very little of the crime narrative conveyed to the jury, and that barrister questioning strategies are largely a function of the assumed sympathies of respective witnesses